THURSDAY, 26 OCTOBER 2000
Why have a user area? Convenience. You have your own place and you can control it; you can save your settings and bluesci will remember what they are. It also gives us a rough idea who you are. Don't worry, we won't sell your email address. Realistically, how much do you think we would get? On a more serious point, this is our starting point, Bluesci is new, and you could help us build it. Our mission is to deliver scientific and technical news, knowledge and understanding to users. That includes us, because we have our own mountains to climb. We are not looking down on you from the top of Everest. We are all learning too.Blusci will publish stories or comments at any and every level of depth. There are no upper and no lower limits. We will rank submissions according to their difficulty, so you will be able to select a level on the site that suits you, and work your way up. If you're new to science and technology we'd like to give you an easy way in. If you know lots of stuff, we'd like you to find the people and the stories that deliver valuable knowledge to you.
We want to open our minds, get control, and try to drive our personal levels of understanding forward within an area that might seem daunting in terms of its variety and complexity. We want to clear up some of this fog for ourselves so that when we want to do something - anything, that requires technical or scientific knowledge - of any kind, we can find out or work out how to do it, ask someone who knows about it, do it, and show step by step how we've done it by posting the structure on this site. We'll post any source code we use too, but we'll say exactly where we've put it.
THE BLUESCI OPEN STRUCTURE PROJECT
If you happen to want to get something done, such as register a domain name or create an online application form that connects to a database on your website, we'll show you how we've done it so if you want to follow our example instead of finding everything out the hard way, you can. If it's something we haven't done, just ask us what you want to know. This is what we call the 'bluesci open structure' project. We'd like to encourage you to share your structures with us - what is the order in which you do things to tackle a technical challenge of any kind? Don't worry about the level of complexity or detail, simplicity or difficulty. It might just be registering a domain name. It might be some postscript you are writing for printer drivers. Just post it and we will rank it.
Start with a simple comment or story. Or pop by from time to time to watch as things develop. Be a founding contributor to Bluesci, Cambridge's first online site dedicated to the delivery of Science and Technology knowledge and understanding.
Rend S. Shakir is a Ph.D. student in Psychiatry at St. Catharine's
